The online world is built with many platforms to share content on. From the favourite social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and then of course there’s the platforms with more scope to produce creative content, such as Vimeo, Vine and YouTube. Of these three, YouTube is the one that the masses are more likely to be familiar with. Some of you might be wondering right now what this has to do with marketing, YouTube has a reputation for endless amounts of amateur content, but can it not be a valuable marketing tool as well?

In previous blogs I’ve talked a lot about viral videos and how larger companies have realised that they are an extremely beneficial marketing tool, but viral videos could not exist without a popular video host. Queue YouTube. There are more benefits to YouTube than people realise, it might be hard to believe but YouTube actually offers more than a free and unlimited platform… which when you think about it, is pretty good anyway.

YouTube focusses largely on how your video content is viewed on other online platforms. When you upload a video, you have the option to share it in at least ten different forms. The most common of these would be Facebook, Twitter, Google+… but then there’s others: Bebo, Tumblr, Reddit, Pinterest and Odnoklassniki (which, going off my five Russian lessons, is Russian – but that’s as much light as I can shed) are all on the extensive list. The analytical features on YouTube are incredibly clear and beneficial as well as allowing you to see whether you are targeting the right demographic. It is carefully assessed by age, gender, location as well as other means of analysis and is formatted in nice graphs so you can see where and who your video reaching – and be very smug when Madagascar is highlighted on the map feature, as unlikely as that is.

Though you might not be aware of it, YouTube has very closely integrated with Google… this relationship means that YouTube ranks very highly in search results. YouTube is also the second largest search engine, which means when you’re Googling the pros and cons of YouTube, you’re much more likely to find this video from Lambda Films, a web production business based in East Anglia, which is actually very informative when it comes to using YouTube to its full potential. You might also choose to watch it if you want to learn how to flirt with a camera, as this guy does just that… not sure why you’d want to learn to flirt with a camera – come to think of it.

The video details how a ‘well optimised’ YouTube vid might appear above the web results in the Google ranks. This happens when Google selects it as quality content that contends with the other web results. In order for this to occur your video has to be well optimised though, and fortunately YouTube has a feature to tag the video with relevant subjects, so get tagging.

Just as a side note, you can actually combine cat videos are promotional work… not regularly, but this video seems to work!

It might be free, but YouTube is by no means unprofessional, on the contrary is carries with it the ability to really boost your business… so if I were you I’d take advantage of that.

Another blog that’s worth looking at is this one, if you’re still after more video marketing tips.